Sibilant consonant
A sibilant is a type of fricative or affricate consonant, made by directing a jet of air through a narrow channel in the vocal tract towards the sharp edge of the teeth. Strident refers to the perceptual intensity of the sound of a sibilant consonant. A strident sound could be described as harsh, insistent, and discordant. In phonetics and acoustics the term sibilant is also used to describe the articulatory or aerodynamic mechanisms that produce strident noise. By analogy, the terms shibilant and thibilant are used to refer to specifically postalveolar sibilants and non-strident analogues, respectively. Acoustics Sibilants are louder than their non-sibilant counterparts, and most of their acoustic energy occurs at higher frequencies than non-sibilant fricatives. has the most acoustic strength at around 8,000 Hz, but can reach as high as 10,000 Hz. has the bulk of its acoustic energy at around 4,000 Hz, but can extend up to around 8,000 Hz. Whistled sibilants Whistled sibilants occur in speech pathology and may be caused by dental prostheses or orthodontics. However, they also occur phonemically in several southern Bantu languages, the best known being Shona. These have been variously described—as labialized but not velarized, retroflex, etc., but none of these articulations are required for the sounds.Shosted 2006 Using the Extended IPA, Shona sv and zv may be transcribed and . Other transcriptions seen include purely labial and (Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996) and labially co-articulated and . Inventories Only the alveolar and palato-alveolar sibilants are distinguished in English; the former may be either apical or laminal, while the latter are usually apical, slightly labialized and generally called simply "postalveolar": or and ), as in sin s̻ɪn and shin . Although laminal and apical sibilants are not distinguished in English, Basque does distinguish these two phonemically, as well as having true postalveolars ( ). Polish and Russian have laminal denti-alveolars, palatalized denti-alveolars, flat postalveolars, and alveolo-palatals ( ), whereas Mandarin has apical alveolars, flat postalveolars, and alveolo-palatals ( ). Few languages distinguish more than three series of sibilants without secondary articulation, but Ubykh has four series of plain sibilants, , as does the Bzyp dialect of the related Abkhaz, and the Chinese dialect of Qinan, in Shandong province, is said to have five. Toda has a laminal alveolar, an apical postalveolar, laminal domed postalveolars, and sub-apical palatals. Since two of these could be called 'retroflex', Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996 have resurrected the old IPA diacritic for retroflex, the underdot, for apical retroflexes, and reserve the letters for sub-apical retroflexes. Thus the Toda sibilants can be transcribed , although the official IPA symbols are also sufficient. (In some publications the underdot and underbar are interchanged.) Contested definitions Authors including Chomsky and Halle group and as sibilants. However, they do not have the grooved articulation and high frequencies of other sibilants, and most phoneticiansLadefoged & Maddieson 1996 continue to group them together with the bilabial fricatives , as non-sibilant anterior fricatives. For a grouping of sibilants and , the term strident is more common. Some researchers judge to be strident in one language, e.g. the African language Ewe, as determined by experimental measurements of amplitude, but as non-strident in English. The nature of sibilants as so-called 'obstacle fricatives' is complicated - there is a continuum of possibilities relating to the angle at which the jet of air may strike an obstacle. The grooving often considered necessary for classification as a sibilant has been observed in ultrasound studies of the tongue for supposedly non-sibilant voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative.Stone and Lundberg, 1996, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 99: 3728-3737 Symbols The following sibilants are in the International Phonetic Alphabet: :Alveolar: :* , (either apical or laminal). :Postalveolar: :* , (Palato-alveolar: that is, "domed" (partially palatalized) postalveolar, either laminal or apical) :* , (Alveolo-palatal: that is, laminal palatalized postalveolar; these are equivalent to ) :* , : (Retroflex, which can mean one of three things: (a) non-palatalized apical postalveolar, (b) sub-apical postalveolar or pre-palatal, or © non-palatalized laminal ("flat") postalveolar, sometimes transcribed or . Diacritics can be used for finer detail. For example, apical and laminal alveolars can be specified as vs ; a dental (or more likely denti-alveolar) sibilant as ; a palatalized alveolar as ; and a generic postalveolar as , a transcription frequently used when none of the above apply (that is, for a laminal but non-palatalized, or "flat", postalveolar). Some of the Northwest Caucasian languages also have a closed laminal postalveolar, without IPA symbols but provisionally transcribed as . See also * De-essing * Plosives * Strident vowels References * *Shosted, Ryan K. (2006) Just put your lips together and blow? The whistled fricatives of Southern Bantu. Notes Category:Consonants br:Kensonenn dre c'hwitellat ca:Sibilant cs:Sykavka da:Sibilant de:Zischlaut es:Consonante sibilante eo:Siblanto ko:치찰음 he:עיצורים שורקים nl:Sibilant no:Sibilanter nn:Sibilant fi:Sibilantti sv:Sibilant